Ms. Norwood’s daughter, Naomi Norwood, confirmed the dying however didn’t present a trigger.
Over a four-decade profession that started with slide guidelines and moved into the age of laptop modeling, Ms. Norwood grew to become generally known as a resourceful drawback solver who typically stumble on easy however efficient options. She was additionally normally the one girl on the workforce — with a minimum of one male colleague within the Fifties at Hughes Plane quitting somewhat than work beneath her management.
He later returned to the corporate and requested to work with Ms. Norwood. She turned him down.
With an Military Sign Corps workforce within the late Forties, her group was caught over measure wind velocity within the higher stratosphere above 100,000 toes, readings important in creating long-range climate forecasting. Ms. Norwood got here up with a tool made from reflective disks — suspended on fishing-line swivels — that will spin on a climate balloon and could possibly be tracked by radar. The thought was patented beneath her title.
Within the Nineteen Sixties, when Ms. Norwood was at Hughes, she confronted a puzzle over a deliberate satellite tv for pc that grew to become generally known as Landsat 1: preserve the Earth-scanning gear from breaking beneath the stress of fixed motion? She sought out Hughes’s “resident inventor,” S.D. “Webb” Howe, who determined your entire scanner wouldn’t transfer, simply mirrors would.
Underneath Ms. Norwood’s path, Howe designed a separate pivoting mirror that swayed backwards and forwards at 13 occasions per second within the weightlessness of area. Every time it rocked, the mirror collected extra knowledge from the sunshine spectrum, each seen and invisible, and fed it into the scanner.
Not everybody was on board. “They knew that there was a banging mirror,” Ms. Norwood advised the MIT Expertise Overview. “They simply felt that was too crude.”
However it labored. The launch of the satellite tv for pc in July 1972 was a crowning achievement for Ms. Norwood. She grew to become generally known as the “mom of Landsat” and credited with serving to deliver a totally new perspective and understanding of the planet and its interlocking options and ecosystems.
Ms. Norwood’s Multispectral Scanner — capturing seen colours and different wavelengths not picked up on regular gear similar to infrared — took the present satellite tv for pc imagery past simply wanting on the floor. Her scanner introduced insights into points similar to water high quality, crop well being, soil moisture and snowpack density.
For the primary time, digital knowledge was accessible that allowed preventive motion: recognizing tree blights in early levels or offering complete data on watersheds for crop planning and flood safety. NASA later stated it was the primary digital knowledge transmission from area.
For as we speak’s researchers, the pictures from the early generations of Landsat satellites provide necessary baseline information to evaluate local weather change, shoreline erosion, rainforest loss and different shifts.
“I’d go to conferences and folks have been simply leaping up and down as a result of that they had found one other use for the info,” Ms. Norwood recalled.
She already had triumphs on the moon beneath her belt. The lunar probe Surveyor 1, which touched down in June 1966, was NASA’s first craft to make it safely to the moon’s floor. Surveyor 1 and the next Surveyors in the course of the Nineteen Sixties have been scouts searching for fundamental questions: What was the moon’s crust like, and the place have been the most effective potential spots to land a crewed mission?
“They didn’t need the person to fall down a crack within the moon,” Ms. Norwood recalled.
Her job, together with the microwave group she led at Hughes, was to develop transmitters and receivers on Surveyor to select up NASA’s instructions. Among the many many issues, area was tight. Surveyor was compact, and the communications system needed to be, too.
Ms. Norwood discovered the reply within the design of flowers: an antenna that opened up from a decent bud right into a parabola-shaped dish. That grew to become her second patent.
In 2020, a NASA interviewer requested Ms. Norwood if she was comfy with the sobriquet “mom of Landsat.”
Ms. Norwood didn’t hesitate. “Sure. I prefer it, and it’s apt,” she stated. “I created it. I birthed it, and I fought for it.”
Virginia Monroe Tower was born at Fort Totten, within the New York Metropolis borough of Queens, on Jan. 8, 1927. Her father was an Military officer, and her mom tended to the house but in addition studied arithmetic and languages on her personal.
The household moved frequently due to army postings in Oklahoma (the place she was in a Lady Scout troop led by Gen. George S. Patton’s daughter, Ruth), Panama and Bermuda. The household then went to Pittsburgh when her father took a place instructing physics at Carnegie Institute of Expertise, now a part of Carnegie Mellon College. (Her father made her first slide rule when she in grade faculty.)
She enrolled in 1943 at MIT, one in every of a few dozen girls in her class. She later referred to as it navigating a “sea of males.” She graduated in 1947 with a level in mathematical physics.
Quickly after getting her diploma, she married her former calculus teacher at MIT, Lawrence Norwood.
Ms. Norwood stated she was turned down by many employers for tech-related positions, presumably due to her gender. At Sikorsky Plane, she walked away after being requested to vow to not get pregnant if she took a job in meals providers. At one level, she labored at a division retailer in New Haven, Conn., hiding her having been an MIT graduate.
In 1948, she and her husband have been provided a job on the Military’s Sign Corps laboratories in New Jersey. The couple moved to Southern California in 1953, the place the climate was higher to take pleasure in Ms. Norwood’s ardour for sports activities vehicles. (Her final automotive, a blue six-speed Mazda Miata, was pushed till Ms. Norwood couldn’t renew her license in the course of the pandemic.)
In California, Ms. Norwood first labored for Sylvania Digital Protection Labs and arrange its antenna check vary, after which joined Hughes. After she was put answerable for the microwave group within the firm’s missile lab in 1957 — the primary girl within the position — a male co-worker stop. He was rehired at Hughes, however Ms. Norwood rejected his request to return to her workforce.
Ms. Norwood additionally led the design of the transmitter and microwave receiver for the world’s first communications satellite tv for pc, Syncom 2, used within the first two-way satellite tv for pc name between authorities leaders when President John F. Kennedy in Washington chatted with Nigeria’s prime minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, in 1963.
Ms. Norwood retired in 1989. Amongst her awards was the O.M. Miller Cartographic Medal from the American Geographical Society in 2022 for her Landsat imaging system that “reworked expectations of how we will know the Earth.”
Her first marriage resulted in divorce. She later married Maurice Schaeffer, who died in 2010. A son from her first marriage, David Norwood, died in 2012.
Along with her daughter, survivors embrace one other youngster from her first marriage, Peter Norwood; three stepchildren, David Schaeffer, Andrew Schaeffer and Claudia Schaeffer; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Landsat goes on: now as much as Landsat 9. There’s additionally a “Women of Landsat” group for girls who’ve labored in this system over the a long time since Ms. Norwood.
“I’ve spent my life the place I used to be the one girl in a program,” Ms. Norwood advised Science in 2021. “Now, there’s an entire group of them. That’s sort of good.”
